DigitMemo.com

More than three dozen major improvements and more than two million lines of changed program code that promise more features, more security and performance.

A few months later than had been planned, Mozilla released on Monday night the first beta version of an overhauled Firefox, the widely used open-source Web browser.

Firefox 3 beta 1 includes a number of significant features that Mozilla said should improve security, ease of use, rendering of Web pages, and location of previously visited Web pages. And for the new era of rich Internet applications, the browser can run Web-based applications even when the computer is disconnected from a network.

The software is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux at Mozilla’s download site in 20 languages. Under the hood, Firefox 3.0 introduces version 1.9 of the Gecko rendering platform (Firefox 4.0 is planned to be built on the completely new Mozilla 2.0 platform), which Mozilla says has been in development for more than two years. Compared to version 1.8x of Firefox 2.0x, more than 2 million lines of code have been touched and changed, fixing more than 11,000 “issues”. The result, according to Mozilla, isn’t just sleeker code, but also more performance, more stability and correctness of visualizing code. 

But the 6.2 MB package also offers several new features, some of which would have been expected already for Firefox 2.0 and some of which could introduce more convenience how the Internet is browsed and how web pages are viewed today. Among the 39 major enhancements that are listed by the Beta 1 release notes are a new “favicon” next to the URL bar, providing a snapshot of a currently viewed sites and displaying information on who operates the site and possible security issues – which can be blocked right from a pop-up window. Also new is a zoom feature that lets users zoom in and out of a web page by pressing the key combination CTRL+ or CTRL-, a better integration with anti-virus software as well as Windows Vista and Mac OS X. There are also simplified password and bookmark management tools. On the security side, Firefox now warns of websites that are known to host malware (Mozilla also preps a blacklist of malware sites) and the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer displayed.